Good Golly, Which Molly? : The Teen Dream Graduates to an Adult Role and Doesn’t Have to Worry About Box Office

For the person who sits on the recording end of a reporter’s microphone, interviews are a risky prop osition. Molly Ringwald, one of six stars in HBO’s “Women & Men: Stories of Seduction,” premiering Sunday at 9 p.m., knows that. She’s seen more angles in the last eight years than a high-rise architect does over a lifetime.

Everyone has an angle on Ringwald.

When she broke into film at 14 in Paul Mazursky’s adult fable, “Tempest,” New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael hailed her as “fresh and believable.”

In 1986, on the heels of John Hughes’ wildly successful Ringwald trilogy--”Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink”--Ringwald, at 18, was crowned prom queen of the movies, with fanfare from her so-called “Ringlets,” on the cover of Time.

But last month, following a forgettable string of films, Premiere magazine pegged Ringwald, at the sage old age of 22, “a case study in career decline.” “It’s really funny, but just about every journalist that I’ve met feels that they have to burn you in some way,” Ringwald said calmly. “That they’re not doing their job unless they get a reaction, unless they get a response.”

On a record-heat day in Los Angeles, Ringwald was in her publicist’s office, sitting politely in front of a fourth-floor window with her legs crossed and hands folded on her lap. The sun shone through Venetian blinds over her shoulder and dappled her in diffused light, setting fire to her short-cropped red hair.

“I’ve never read anything about me that I thought was accurate,” she said with a helpless shrug. “Each story about me is completely different, like they’re all interviewing a different person. And none of them are really about me. “

Ringwald is sending out a somewhat personalized message with “Women & Men.” The trilogy, based on short stories by Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway, examines the intricacies of male-female relationships found in literature. It’s also an example of the thoughtful, adult work that Ringwald--a devout reader of classic literature--wants to be associated with.

(Elizabeth McGovern and Beau Bridges co-star in McCarthy’s “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” while Melanie Griffith and James Woods team up in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”)

In her segment, “Dust Before Fireworks,” Ringwald co-stars as Kit, a temperamental woman in the 1930s hopelessly enamored with Peter Weller, a passive-aggressive playboy or, as Parker wrote, “a very good-looking young man indeed, shaped to be annoyed” with a voice “as intimate as the rustle of sheets.”

“I was not assaulted by, not accosted by, but firmly invited to meet with Molly for a story that we thought she was too young for,” veteran producer David Brown said. “She strode in looking for all the world like she just came from an Ivy League college and said, ‘I want to play this role. I’ve studied the work of Dorothy Parker, and this role speaks to me.’

“I said, ‘How can you possibly think of yourself as a sophisticate of that period when that woman is clearly a somewhat older woman?’ She said, ‘Mr. Brown, you possibly don’t realize that a younger woman in the thrall of such a man is an even more powerful situation.’ She added, ‘I speak from experience.’ ”

Brown said he did something unprecedented in his producing experience. With grave apprehensions, he cast Ringwald at the risk of losing the director he wanted, Ken Russell of “Women in Love.”

“It’s almost unheard of to cast a part and leave the director without any options,” Brown said. “But he met Molly and pronounced her brilliant. And Ken is not known to be a yes-man.”

Ringwald said the HBO project is a welcome relief because she won’t be judged by box-office standards for a change. “I think it can mean something,” she said hopefully. “Betsy’s Wedding,” Ringwald’s last theatrical film for Alan Alda, did mild business.

But the actress displayed no outward concern over her recent slump at the box office. She laughed easily and often, and shrugged off her critics when the topic arose. “I did this huge press junket for ‘Betsy’s Wedding,’ ” she said, “and people kept wanting to tell me or ask me or insist that I’ve regretted choices that I’ve made. That’s absurd.

“I can’t sit here and say, ‘You know, I really regret that.’ Because then it just sort of invalidates your experience.”

And whether Ringwald can make the transition into an actress for young adults to admire and emulate, the way she was for fashion-minded flocks of teen-age girls, is still to be seen. In the meantime, reporters will have their way with Ringwald, and she will dutifully answer their questions and hope they get it right.

“I’ve been portrayed as everything from very wholesome, to the girl-next-door, to cold and reserved, to wonderfully intelligent, to melancholy and depressed, to borderline suicidal.” She laughed. “I know the press has to have an angle. So I just sort of let them have it.”